Chances are you have never heard of James B. Steele and Donald Barlett. They are not bloggers, or pundits. They rarely appear on television. They are, in the best sense of the word, investigative journalists who spend months crafting painstakingly written and researched articles and books on subjects ranging from corporate welfare and the inequities of federal tax law to what's wrong with our health care system.
That reporting has garnered them two Pulitzer Prizes and two national magazine awards, and countless other journalism citations. At annual conventions of Investigative Reporters and Editors, the two were mobbed like rock stars. Indeed they are so revered that just last month, Arizona State University created the Barlett and Steele awards to honor outstanding investigative business journalism.
However, their careers are a very good parable about an increasingly profit-driven mass media and its ebbing commitment to fact-based investigative journalism.
It used to be that daily newspapers would invest real resources in investigative journalism. When Barlett and Steele were at The Philadelphia Inquirer, that newspaper gave them the time and space to craft their stores that explained complex issues in terms and with anecdotes that the average reader could understand. Twenty years ago, they turned out 60,000- and 70-word series that readers actually read. Indeed, their series, "America What Went Wrong" was so popular - 400,000 requests for reprints in this pre-Internet era -- that the Inquirer turned it into a book.
But that era for newspapers is long gone. The new home for investigative journalists and for Barlett and Steele became mass circulation magazines. In 1997, the investigative duo went to Time, buoyed by the thought of writing for not only Time but its sister publications Fortune and Money and to do book projects and even television documentaries.
This was supposed to be the upside of media monopolies. Enough resources for first-class reporting and the distribution system to reach a wider audience.
But things have not worked out that way. Barlett and Steele did good work for Time. But Time reciprocated by handing them a pink slip in early 2006. "We'll miss their work," John Huey, Time's then-editor-in-chief, told The New York Times. But the bottom line was the bottom line. "They're very good but very expensive," Huey added.
While Time found investigative reporting too costly, it seems to have scraped together the dough to hire more bloggers and talking head pundits like National Journal's William Kristol and Michael Kinsley, former editor of Slate, and Ana Marie Cox, the founder of a Washington gossip blog, Wonkette.
Luckily for Barlett and Steele, they have found a new home, at Vanity Fair. But unluckily for the rest of us, the trajectory of the most revered investigative journalists in the country has demonstrated that the mass media has lost interest in serving the public, and fails in its obligation to provide us with news and fact-based information.
The last thing that mass media deserves is the government's permission to get bigger or to own both print and broadcast outlets in the same community. If the next generation of Barlett and Steele is to have a chance, they will only be able to flourish in a diverse media environment. Not an environment where profit trumps all other values, including good journalism.
